Salon.com Politics | Throwing ovaries

in his comedic new book, "The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'n' Roll," rock critic Chuck Eddy describes watching the all-guy band Girls Against Boys at last year's Lollapalooza. From the Kansas City show he writes, "Some apparent ex-Deadhead with burgeoning middle-age-spread asked me what they were called: 'That's great! Girls are always trying to do shit better than boys! -- fuck that!!'"

Even though Girls Against Boys aren't on the current Lolla lineup, the summer festival fare has co-opted their name. Because of the brouhaha surrounding the all-female Lilith Fair, you can't open a newspaper or magazine lately without wincing at this second-grade-of-the-mind afoot. When I saw the roster for this summer's Lollapalooza Festival -- Tool, Korn, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Prodigy, Tricky, Orbital, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Devo -- I thought, "Oh brother. All boys. Again." But if Lolla's boys are warding off girl cooties, then Lilith's girls -- Sarah McLachlan, Tracy Chapman, Jewel, Sheryl Crow, Lisa Loeb, Joan Osborne, et al. -- are nailing a pretty pink sign to their own cuter clubhouse marked, "NO BOYS ALLOWED."

Personally, I barely care. I won't be attending either shindig. Because, hey, even though there's nothing I'd rather do than stand around for 18 hours in 90-degree heat with an aching back and a $5 beer listening to music with 10,000 fellow music lovers -- because I sure love music and I sure love the people who love music and I sure love the people who make music, and what better way to prove I love music than to throw away, I mean devote, a day of my life to worshipping at the altar of rock -- I'm the type who prefers the mediated luxuries of home (there's a radio and a TV in here and several places to sit). Even facing two hours at a club to hear someone I actually care about is stretching it these days, and not just because I want to avoid smoky-coat syndrome, but because the music made in clubs sometimes seems completely incidental. Or, as Eddy puts it, "What originally made me give up going to live shows in the late '80s was my sudden brainstorm at an Ann Arbor gig by pre-Nirvana Seattle grungers Mudhoney that concerts were more a social activity than a musical one, and my main activity tended to be standing around waiting for them to end."

So even though I won't be sunburning at either festival, I've been reading a lot about them, and so far, I haven't read one thing about Lilith Fair that isn't complete puffery plastered with pseudo-feminist smiley-faces. The headline for Jon Pareles' piece in the July 7 New York Times, for instance, offended me: "Sisterhood and Solidarity, With an Audience: Cheers for Self-Determination at a Touring All-Female Festival." Lilith Fair isn't a picture of solidarity so much as a picture of uniformity. McLachlan, the event's organizer, has chosen singer-songwriters in her own image: pretty, polite, folksy moderates with sensible hair and more melody than message. I'm surprised by the Times' report that in the audience at the tour's first stop in George, Wash., "women outnumbered men by about 3-to-1" because these performers strike me as just the sort of women most men seem to like: They're cute, nice and not extravagantly smart.

This cheering "sisterhood and solidarity" tag is too pat, too 1974, too rooted in the dusty notion that you should support your so-called sisters whether you agree with them or not. Just because I have ovaries doesn't make me feel solidarity with horrid Tracy Chapman and her obvious, hippie-dippy songs like "The Rape of the World"; or claim sisterhood with wimpy, meek-voiced Lisa Loeb; or cheer ditzy Sheryl Crow, whose song about how "If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad" was probably meant as a defense of eating ice cream or sleeping around or something, but I can't hear it without imagining Joseph Stalin lip-synching it as a defense of all things evil.

"It doesn't exclude men, it simply celebrates women," says McLachlan of the tour. This is just the sort of treacly sentiment that favors fakey platitudes over critical thinking. I don't celebrate McLachlan, whose maudlin songs with lyrics like "Morning smiles like the face of a newborn child, innocent, unknowing" are so saccharine my teeth hurt just thinking about them. I can't celebrate Joan Osborne, whose phony blues-mama act gives me the creeps. And I won't celebrate Jewel's mundane coffeehouse mush.

And if you think the performers come off sugary, you should get a load of the Web site. Illustrated with a stupid woman-as-nature line drawing of a nude female with a flower growing out of her head, www.lilithfair.com is posting a dopey diary of the event's progress, comprising commentary along the lines of "Love is in the air tonight." Really. It even describes the fair's admirable charitable fund-raising for women's causes in nauseating language: "The corporate support has been divided into various thematic categories, including Learning and Wellness."

McLachlan recently told Entertainment Weekly that, "after centuries of women's voices and ideas being suppressed, we've finally come into a time where women can be heard and respected and loved for what they say." I thought we'd come into a time where women can be heard so that the world can decide whether or not that individual is worth listening to. Love and respect are always optional.